“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In a manner of speaking, it can be said that you have reincarnational civilizations as well as reincarnating individuals. Each entity who is born in flesh works toward the development of those abilities that can be best nurtured and fulfilled within the physical environment. He has a responsibility to and for the civilization in which he has each existence, for he helps form it through his own thoughts, emotions, and actions.

The strength of this second civilization lay mainly in the areas now known as Africa and Australia, although at that time not only was the climate entirely different, but the land areas. There was a different attraction of land mass having to do with the altered position of the poles. Relatively speaking, however, the civilization was concentrated in area; it did not attempt to expand. It was highly ingrown and dwelled upon the planet simultaneously with a large, unorganized, dispersed, primitive culture.

The members of this civilization were largely a fringe group from the earlier successful civilization, most of whom had decided to continue existence in other areas of your physical universe. These, however, were particularly enamored of earthly life, and also thought that they could improve upon the last experiment in which they had been involved, though they were free to move on to other layers of existence.

They formed energy fields around their own civilization. They were, therefore, isolated from contact with other groups. They did not allow technology to destroy them, however. More and more of them realized that the experiment was not a success. Some, after physical death, left to join those from the previous successful civilization, who had migrated to other planetary systems within the physical structure.

[...] The grandeurs and disasters of such civilizations were contained. No great idea would spread from civilization to civilization; no war would leap from land to land. [...]

(Today I looked over a Time-Life book on the ancient civilizations of the Americas—the Aztecs, Incas, Mixtecs, etc, and once more was impressed by their amazing abilities as far as architecture, carving, weaving, astronomy, etc., went. [...] We discussed the amazing facts that the American civilizations had existed for centuries concurrently with the European and Far Eastern ones, but with each totally isolated from the other. [...]

[...] But I saw similarities of course between those various news events happening in far portions of the earth today, and the thought that the American and European civilizations had existed for so long on the same planet, yet completely unknown one to the other.

—you have been reading about ancient American civilizations. [...]

[...] Your civilization is organized around science and technology, and generally speaking, now, the arts and other schools of knowledge have been largely subsidiary. [...] But these civilizations were not organized around technology, so that the technological advances, while highly sophisticated, were not pursued with the same diligence as in your time, and they were considered novelties—playthings for the wealthy, advanced toys, but not considered in a serious light.

[...] The inner psychic organizations always determine the kind of challenges and civilizations that emerge. There have been civilizations devoted mainly to art, in which all other endeavors were considered subsidiary, and the quality of workmanship was everything, no matter what the product. [...]

There were “modern,” or highly sophisticated civilizations, utilizing some technology, long before the dates given for the invention of writing (about 3100 BC). [...]

There were several such civilizations, some mainly agriculturally oriented, and in those technology was applied, but generally only for that purpose—to increase agricultural yield. [...]

[...] Your civilizations are your splendid, creative, exterior renditions of the inner social groupings of the cells of the body, and the cooperative processes of nature that give you physical life. This does not mean that the intellect is any less, but that it uses its abilities to help you form physical civilizations that are the reflections of mental, spiritual, and biological inner civilizations. [...]

[...] I have mentioned civilizations often before. But it is sometimes almost impossible to verbally describe civilizations of scent, civilizations built upon temperature variations, alphabets of color, pressure gradations — all of these highly intimate and organized, but quite outside of verbal representation. [...]

A note: Your exterior civilizations do indeed mirror and reflect the great cellular civilizations, so that you try to exteriorize that kind of order and creativity.

Your present civilization and the “old” (in quotes) Sumerian (spelled) civilization, exist at once, then, simultaneously, but to speak to you about these I must use a time sequence you understand. If it were understood that these civilizations exist at once then you would not be so surprised that they “were” (in quotes) able to build structures that you cannot build in your now.

In the present physical area in which it seems to you that a physical civilization once existed, that civilization still exists. [...] The civilization in flower, and the ruins, coexist. [...]

[...] I came across them in one of the books on ancient history that Shirley Bickford, one of Jane’s students, brought for us to consult on the very ancient civilization, Sumeria, in Mesopotamia, from 4,000—2,000 BC, I believe, without consulting dates.

[...] All however would appear as superhuman in contrast to those civilizations that encountered them. [...]

[...] Now it is not generally known that there was a civilization at that time, rather well developed, in the southwestern corner of the continent. [...] And on the land, which you then inherited, there were artifacts from a still earlier civilization. [...] And in one of your excursions you came upon the image of a small god, long since forgotten by that civilization, and the god was called “Marumba.” [...] The civilization, even then long forgotten, had lost all of the knowledge that that earlier civilization possessed. [...]

[...] The Torimba tribe in Africa ended up after many centuries in Asia Minor carrying with them remnants of their past civilization. [...]

[...] The legend of Atlantis is actually based upon several such civilizations. No particular civilization is the basis, however. Apart from that, the legend as picked up, so to speak, by Plato (see Appendix 14) was a precognition of the future probability, an image of an inner civilization of the mind actually projected outward into the future, where it would be used as a blueprint, dash — the lost grandeur, as, in other terms, Eden became the lost garden of paradise.

[...] So many civilizations exist at once, then, and there are certain bleed-throughs. In your terms some civilizations are real and perceivable, and some are not.

[...] However, in your terms there are ruins of the civilizations that served as the ‘concrete’ basis for the one Atlantean legend. Those civilizations were scattered. [...]

[...] They are psychic yearnings toward the ideal civilization — patterns within the psyche, even as each fetus has within it the picture of its own most ideal fulfillment toward which it grows.

(9:40.) This was, as I told you, the second, and perhaps most interesting of the three civilizations. [...] These are the people I mentioned earlier, who finally went on to other planets within other galaxies, and from whom the people of the Lumanian civilization came.

While the civilization of the Lumanians was highly concentrated, in that they made no attempt to conquer others or to spread out to any great extent in area, they did set out, over the centuries, outposts from which they could emerge and keep track of the other native peoples.

(A note, added later: Seth gives no dates for the Lumanian civilization. [...]

[...] They were limited in numbers and largely cut off from the main areas of their own civilization. [...]

[...] In the discussion of “primitive” and “civilized” man that followed, Warren presented his opinion that some civilizations, such as those of Babylonia, Egypt, the Incas, and so forth, had been founded by initiate groups from Atlantis⁴ … that while “primitive” man may have had a kind of gestalt consciousness, he had no individual consciousness. As Warren made similar remarks about the development of individual consciousness through historical times to our point of civilization, Seth suddenly and unexpectedly came through loudly and forcefully:

(To Warren:) Now, when you learn to communicate with the gracious ease with which those primitive people communicated, then you can call yourself civilized. You [as a member of the human species] do indeed see yourself as the supreme flower of history so far, yet when you can know what is going on clearly and concisely on the other side of Elmira, and can communicate it also, then you will be as primitive and as civilized as some of those primitive people.

[...] Therefore, that world-probability in which telepathy and clairvoyance⁸ would have been common, well-known facts of life, self-evident in any civilization — that probability became latent while the species followed another route.

[...] — there are points, again speaking simply and in your terms, where probabilities meet: intersections with space and time that occur in your minds while you change directions, where new probabilities that once lay latent suddenly emerge.⁹ And in terms of your civilization and your time, such a time is now.

In those terms, the great religions of your civilizations rise from myths that change their character through the centuries, even as mountain ranges rise and fall. [...] You see your myths somewhat less directly, yet they are apparent within all of your activities, and they form the inner structures of all of your civilizations with their multitudinous parts.

[...] They mix and merge the inner, unseen but felt, eternal psychic experience of man with the temporal events of his physical days, and form a combination that structures thoughts and beliefs from civilization to civilization. [...]

[...] That representation is then used as a model upon which your civilizations are organized, and also as a perceptual tool through whose lens you interpret the private events of your life in their historical context.

[...] Myths are originally psychic fabrications of such power and strength that whole civilizations can rise from their source. [...]

[...] The other two civilizations were in many ways more successful, and yet the strong intent behind the Lumanians’ experiment was extremely volatile. [...]

[...] And so there have been such bleed-throughs between your own civilization and the Lumanians’.

(A note: According to Seth, the Lumanians were the second of a group of three highly technological civilizations that existed on our planet long before the time of Atlantis. [...]

[...] Nature in all of its varieties is so richly encountered by the animals that it becomes their equivalent of your structures of culture and civilization. They respond to its rich nuances in ways impossible to describe, so that their “civilizations” are built up through the interweavings of sense data that you cannot possibly perceive.

(I told Jane that I think Seth’s material on the animals’ sense equivalents of human civilizations is the best of its kind I’ve ever heard — most evocative indeed. [...]

I do not want to go into the complicated reasons why your civilization chose such beliefs, but you are everywhere presented with their effects. In your historical times, no civilization has been based upon the precepts I have given you. [...]

Your civilization has decided upon certain beliefs of a quite contradictory nature, however. [...]

[...] There were other religions in other times that held a sway over civilizations for far longer periods. [...] The longevity of those religions and their effects upon those ancient civilizations are certainly not taken by “modern men” as proof that those religions had any basis in fact. [...]

[...] The earthquake is a mass natural catastrophe, seeming then to be perpetrated upon man and his cities by an earth that certainly does not take man or his civilization into consideration.

[...] It is said that there must be something, surely, to the story of Christ, since civilization was so altered. [...]

The interweaving of “dream reality” with the world of facts, however, is precisely what causes a myth to begin with, and is the source of its tremendous power, for it combines the two realities into a construct powerful enough to charge civilizations with new vitality, and literally to reshape man’s course. [...]

In many ancient civilizations, the night with its blackness was revered, and the secrets of nighttime consciousness explored. [...] The two seemingly separate aspects of consciousness merged, and there were flowerings of art and civilization that are, in your terms now, almost impossible to conceive. And in such civilizations all races were accorded their place, joyfully, and those of all ages were respected for their particular contributions.

[...] Your beliefs about age, like everything else, will form your experience, and your mass beliefs will affect your civilization. [...]

Yet in both of these systems the old are denied their unique power, strength and wisdom, and hence the civilization is robbed as well as the individuals within it.

“Sunday, June 8, 1980: As I went about the day, showering, doing my hair, reading the paper, doing my exercises and so forth, I kept getting stuff from Seth on … the next chapter of his book, I think to be called ‘Master Events and Overlays.’ There can be overlays of one civilization onto another, so that a ‘real’ civilization in one sphere of existence can appear as myth in another…. Our civilization appears as myth in other worlds; that kind of thing represents only one kind of overlay.

[...] Master events may end up translated through mythology, or religion or art, or the effects may actually serve to give a framework to an entire civilization. [...]

[...] Your cultures—your civilizations—obviously affect the well-being of your species, and those cultures are formed by your ideas, and forged through the use of your imaginations and your intellects.

[...] There have indeed been civilizations upon your planet³ that understood as well as you, and without your kind of technology, the workings of the planets, the positioning of stars — people who even foresaw “later” global changes. [...] Some of these civilizations did not need spaceships.⁴ Instead, highly trained men combining the abilities of dream-art scientists and mental physicists cooperated in journeys not only through time but through space. [...]

From the 715th session in Section 4 of Volume 2: “There are civilizations of the psyche, and only by learning about these will you discover the truth about the ‘lost’ civilizations of your planet — for each such physical culture coincided with and emerged from a corresponding portion of the psyche that you even now possess.”

See Chapter 15 of Seth Speaks for Seth’s material on the art and technology of the ancient civilization of Lumina (as well as his references to those that came before and after it). [...]

[...] Beside this, however, many civilizations have come and gone in somewhat the same manner, and the “myth” [of Atlantis] is based somewhat then on physical fact in your terms.”

Now: Dictation: There is a constant give and take between each individual and his or her society; the divisions and characteristics of any particular civilization will be a perfect exterior representation of the overall attributes of the people within it, as they relate to one another and as they see themselves.

[...] You not only form the structure of your civilizations and social institutions through the transference of beliefs, thoughts and feelings; but in this natural exchange you also help on quite intimate levels in the “psychic manufacture” of the physical environment itself, with all of its great sweeping variety, and yet seasonal stability.

[...] At other layers of course your civilization is already in the past, as in others your civilization does not yet exist. [...]

[...] Theoretically all of the information of so-called lost civilizations is quite available to you, as yours is to them. [...]

In terms of experience humanity is working out its problems and challenges end in 20th century terms and in the old Sumerian (spelled) civilization. [...]

[...] It is very possible then to be building a civilization that in your terms you are now studying, to be interpreting ancient records that you yourself may have written, to be digging up roads that you yourself built.

Now some personalities from one system aid other personalities within other systems, but highly developed personalities, those in your terms so far advanced, will set for themselves the task of aiding an entire civilization; of assisting the development of a new system, and sometimes initiating the existence of that system.

[...] Here the family represents an entity who has taken upon itself the nurturing of your civilization. [...]

Such personalities try to affect the feelings and thoughts of a civilization, for these thoughts and feelings will alone bring about events. [...]